The start of this adventure

On Friday, 25 April 2008 I accepted a position in a firm that doesn't have any load testing department. I will be the first load tester and blazing the trail for the firm in question.

I'm leaving my comfy position with a Fortune 50 company with over 1.5 Billion in online sales where I've been load testing various systems for the past eight years with Mercury Interactive LoadRunner.

The big question will be this: Can I find a good open source load testing tool that can get the job done? Can I find a closed source load testing tool that can get the job done and not be as expensive as LoadRunner? LoadRunner is crazy expensive. It gets the job done but there are some things about it that just drive me nuts.

LoadRunner support under HP has really sucked. Big time... Getting a new license for a controller for my replacement laptop took over eight business days. There is no reason it should have been the nightmare that it was.

When I had to create the credentials for the AR system our contract was bound to HP OpenView, not HP MI Load Runner. That took some time to straighten out. It was just a big cluster frak.

For some reason my VUGen would crash both IE and Firefox and I couldn't record scripts. I must've sent back and forth over 20 e-mails with Tier I support who communicated with Tier II supprt. What a PITA that was. Ultimately it doesn't matter since I am leaving my current employer tomorrow. I suggested that they fdisk the drive and reload the OS. There has got to be something on the OS level that is a problem.

Well... We'll just have to see how it goes.

Tomorrow is the last day with my current employer and on 19 May 2008 I'll start with the new firm and we'll see how it goes. It is exciting and scary all at the same time.

So far my initial research has led me to take a closer look at JMeter, The Grinder 3 and OpenSTA. JMeter and OpenSTA look promising but something about The Grinder 3 makes me tingle inside: A loose framework allowing me to run rampant in Jython with actual meaningful string handling routines and native regex support.

OpenSTA seems to be very popular but I don't know if I want to be limited in the code by the SCL scripting language. I've been very spoiled over the past 10 years by perl anonymous hashes and regular expressions. Does Jython even has anonymous hashes? So much to learn! I haven't coded in Python in about seven years so I've forgotten almost all of it.

Weeeee!